2 Dead-End Content Mistakes Killing Your Crawl Health Pt. 3
How thin content and unresolved 404 pages turn away both search bots and valuable traffic.
Once again, continuing with the most overlooked and common SEO related issues.
You can read Pt.1: on Why missing H1s, meta descriptions, and canonicals are holding back your search rankings.
You can read Pt.2: on How duplicate titles, missing alt text, and unflagged external links quietly drain your ranking power.
Note: I will not only list out the SEO related issues, but also provide a step-by-step instructions on how to fix those issues as well. The platform I’ll use across the articles will be WordPress.
- Thin content
Thin content basically means a page with not enough content, Google own SEO documentation recommends having an article/page with enough content (word counts).
Step-by-step fix:
· Go to WordPress Admin Dashboard (/wp-admin),
· Navigate to Pages → Edit page
· Review the page content — it currently has very little text
· Add meaningful and relevant text content to the page
· Aim for at least 300 words that are useful to the visitor
· Save changes
2. 404 Page
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This means that the page was removed (intentionally deleted by the user or redirected to a page that no longer exists).
Step-by-step fix:
· Go to WordPress Admin Dashboard (/wp-admin)
· Navigate to Pages → Edit page
· Fix broken URL or restore the page
If the page is desired to be removed completely, then do the following:
· Navigate to your Google Search Console account
· Search the property (domain) from the drop-down menu
· Navigate to Page removal request
· Add the page url, and select the option Remove all URLs from this prefix
· Then, navigate to Rank Math SEO Redirections (if Rank Math SEO is not already installed, download and install that first)
· Click on Add New
· Add a source URL (this page URL that showed 404 error)
· Add a destination URL (where it gets redirected to, preferred to add your homepage url)
· Redirection type: 301 permanent move
· Status: Active
· Click on Add Redirection
I’ll continue writing article on other common SEO related issues like the ones above. If you found this article helpful, make sure to like and subscribe to receieve more article updates.
